Mastering the Core Teachings of Buddha - An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book

Speaking of the world, Review is a great time to re-engage with the specifics of our life. It is an unfortunate but true fact that one of the possible side effects of the relentless focus on the Three Characteristics that produces these spectacular insights is the habit of not paying much attention to the specifics of our life. The specifics of our life are obviously very, very important, and so now is a great time to pay a lot of attention to them. Those around us may have noticed the side effects of the Dark Night or some of the other stages and be worried about us or even mad at us for how we behaved if we allowed too much to bleed through. It is not always possible to make up for that sort of damage, but now is a good time to try. Take the time to heal the old wounds you discovered in yourself or created in your life while you were in the Dark Night.

Also, go out and have some fun! Enjoy the richness of friendship, exercise, leisure, work, entertainment, service, and life in general. In short, do your best to make your life a great one in the conventional sense. You should have been trying to do that all along, but try to forgive yourself and learn from your mistakes if you were not able to do so.

Remember, the kind of renunciation that brings insights is seeing the true nature of things. If you can see the true nature of the sensations that make up a fun and healthy life, there is no need for any other type of renunciation! In fact, buying into a strong renunciation trip is well known for making people quite neurotic, and then the challenge is to see the true nature of the sensations that make up renunciation-induced neuroses. I’m not convinced that this is an easier way to go.

After attaining a path, particularly the early ones, the feeling that one is particularly special is common, and from a certain point of view it is true and understandable. However, what is truer is that something in the understanding of the relationship to ordinary things is now “special,” or at least somewhat unusual. The attainment of stream entry or a new stage of awakening should be a cause for joy and celebration.

Unfortunately, people who have never attained these things tend to react oddly or even poorly to such disclosures and sentiments. Strangely, many people are very excited about the idea of people getting enlightened but not the idea of you getting enlightened.

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The Progress of Insight

Those with higher levels of understanding than yours will know where you are coming from, but will also know how much more there is to go from their own experience, and their tendency to focus on that can be frustrating. One’s teachers and more advanced companions may find it amusing to be reminded of what it was like to be caught up in the fascination with low levels of realization, but they know that eventually even that has to be seen in some other way. One of my favorite Chogyam Trungpa lines is, “You will never be decorated by your guru.”

Even if you are, I doubt if it will be of any great benefit to you.

Thus, two ironies of the spiritual life that one can encounter here are that success can cause feelings of isolation and that the spiritual path can be a very lonely one indeed. Sometimes writing can help, as can finding those few people who seem to simultaneously be interested in hearing the details of what you are going through without reinforcing your fascination with these in ways that make it harder to see successes in their proper proportion.

It is also not uncommon to feel that what one has experienced is just so staggeringly profound that no one is likely to have ever really seen such amazing things, perhaps including one’s teachers. However, if they are the real deal and qualified to teach you, they are very likely to have their own extensive list of spectacular and profound experiences and realizations. However, as such things are so rarely discussed openly, one may have a hard time believing this. As I have had to learn the hard way, those who are particularly prone to extroversion and immoderate speech in the face of recent insights can easily get themselves into somewhat embarrassing and humbling situations. On the other hand, eventually you may begin to outgrow or surpass your current teachers in understanding and ability. This in and of itself can be confusing and frustrating, causing role reversals that not everyone handles well. You might be astounded at how easy it is to bruise the egos in the conventional psychological sense of those who have seen through the illusion of the ego in the high dharma sense.

As review continues, one gets very familiar with the territory of one’s current path and its stages, and they may pass by more and more quickly and easily. It can begin to seem that the only way to move through the Review stages of insight is to not investigate reality too 215

The Progress of Insight